


A Hundred Years To A Steadfast Heart Are But A Day

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: Fairytales
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 16:56:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The tired people are the hardest to read, the ones who look like they know there's no point. It's the same look he sees every time he passes a mirror or a darkened window, but the reason for it can't be the same. They can't ALL have wives who choked themselves unconscious on a bite of an apple." A 21st century retelling of Snow White and Beauty & the Beast.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Hundred Years To A Steadfast Heart Are But A Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zeldadestry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeldadestry/gifts).



> Big thank you to Dorothy1901 for acting as proxy uploader.

If there's anywhere in the world more depressing than a hospital's allocated smoking area, Milo can't think of one. Except maybe that horrible room upstairs. The night is cold and smells like approaching frost; it makes his breath hang there in front of his mouth even before he lights up, fumbling the packet of matches and scattering half of them on his dirty trainers. He swears quietly around the cigarette clamped between his chilly lips, finally getting a match struck.

He always found something calming about smoking, the whole ritualistic procedure from dropping the tobacco on the paper to that first harsh warm hit at the back of your throat, but not now. Something's getting under his skin, a stupid pestering jabbing crazy little thought: _when you're in a coma, do you miss your smokes?_

*

That woman's there again, sitting on her own in the cafeteria with a polystyrene cup of black tea. Yesterday she left a smudge of lipstick on the rim, a pointless sort of shade that was so close to her own lip colour that it didn't seem worth the effort of putting it on. Today there's nothing, just the indent of her teeth in the top of the cup. She looks tired. She's pretty, huge brown Disney eyes and long hair nearly as dark as Gwen's, but she looks so tired. Milo always plays games with himself in the hospital, like the games children play in traffic jams inventing stories about the people in all the other cars. Sometimes it's so easy stringing out some obvious happy ending, when you see men with big goofy smiles proudly carrying flowers and tiny cuddly toys through the front doors like they're heading a parade. Sometimes it's impossible. The tired people are the hardest to read, the ones who look like they know there's no point. It's the same look he sees every time he passes a mirror or a darkened window, but the reason for it can't be the same. They can't _all_ have wives who choked themselves unconscious on a bite of an apple.

*

Days creep by. Milo goes out for smoke number three and sees the lipstick lady. She's wearing it again, pressing a faint smear on the cork of her cigarette as she flicks her lighter and gets no spark.

"Fuck, fuck," she's muttering, over and over under her breath like a mantra. He wonders how long she's been trying. He couldn't tie his shoelace this morning, he tried a dozen times and just couldn't make the loops work, then he cried for half an hour like a toddler with a skinned knee because he was so bored of feeling helpless.

"I've got matches," he says, and offers her the box.

"Thanks." She strikes a flame into being and gives the box back, sucking deep on the cigarette and blowing the smoke straight up in the air. "Do you feel guilty smoking outside a hospital?"

"I always think that."

"It's like... jamming your finger in your eye outside a blind kids' school."

"Yeah, but they wouldn't know."

Her mouth quivers like she's forcing back a smile, but it's there glinting in her dark eyes. "Bad analogy, you're right."

They smoke in silence, companionable and comfortable.

*

He buys her another cup of black tea for breakfast the next day and sits down in the hard plastic chair opposite her. "I'm Milo."

"I'm Belinda and I'm married."

"So am I."

"Good, just so we're clear." Today is another lipstick day, it glistens in the fluorescent cafeteria lights when she smiles at him, sort of awkward as if she's embarrassed she jumped to conclusions. "Do you work here? You're here a lot."

"Visiting. I'm off work for a bit."

"Me too."

"What do you do?"

"I'm a model. You?"

"Teacher. Not quite as glamorous."

"It's hardly glamorous. My last audition was for a laxative ad."

"Did you get it?"

"Sadly not. Dulcolax must have thought someone else's constipation face was more enticing."

Like smoking outside its doors, laughing inside the hospital feels just as much of an insult.

*

It's good having someone to talk to, or someone _not_ to talk to; companionship is as much about the silences as it is about the talking, and he knows when not to bother her, she knows when to leave him alone. They talk about everything, films and books and telly and holidays and gigs and which pub in town does the cheapest pint, but it's just to waste time. Belinda is the first to ask the question.

"Is it your wife?" she says quietly, not quite looking at him but inspecting the flecked dregs at the bottom of her cup instead. Words tumble out like vomit then, how he shouted at her first when he saw her lying there because it felt like a stupid prank - because this couldn't be _real_, people didn't _really_ come downstairs after a shower to find their wife blue and unconscious on the kitchen floor.

"-and apparently I _saved her life_," he finishes, trying not to sound bitter and failing. "I slapped the apple out of her throat, mouth to mouth til help came, and yes she's still _alive_ but she's been out for two weeks and how is that any different to being dead?"

"You can wake up if you're just asleep," Belinda says.

*

She takes Milo to see Leon and he can't decide whether it's worse. Not that it's some kind of grisly competition, but when the axis of your world gets ripped out and rammed back in at a different crazy angle then of course you're going to start thinking in strange ways. There's no way you'd expect this guy to wake up ever again, not with the state of his shattered face and all the tubes and bandages. Gwen looks like you just need to say her name and she'll open her eyes and blink in that lazy early-morning way she's got of making you never want to leave your bed again. Leon is like a sick cartoon, Kenny smeared up a Colorado road in a patch of scarlet gore, but it's real. His face is black and red, healing in lumps and blisters because melted skin obviously doesn't flow back into place like water. He was a model too, Belinda says. He was the most beautiful man she ever met. He was a stupid fucking arrogant twat and raced one of his mates down the dual carriageway at a hundred and twenty miles an hour until he lost control and flipped his car over like toy dropped down the stairs. Maybe if he hadn't been knocked out he would have got away from the fire without being too badly burned. Maybe if he hadn't been drinking he wouldn't have raced in the first place.

"So here you've got this problem," she says, leaning against the ugly painted wall looking exhausted and sad and so far from beautiful that anyone seeing her for the first time might think she'd made up her job to get a cheap escapist kick from the lie. "Do you stick around and wait for him to wake up, which might never happen, probably wipe his arse for the rest of his life and feed him mush through a straw and push him round in a wheelchair and explain to everyone who stares that no, the ugly monster here _hasn't_ got any kind of heroic Simon Weston story, it's all his own fault for being a brainless stupid prick? Or do you walk out of the hospital, go home, grieve like he's dead, leave him to rot?"

It's not the sort of question that needs an answer so he doesn't bother, but years later he still thinks of her from time to time, how melancholy and beautiful she was, printing her ghost kisses on her cigarettes and throwaway cups, and how in the end _he_ was the first one who stopped going to the hospital.


End file.
